Return

When you're young, returning home after an extended trip feels like entering a new space, as if the house too was on vacation, and has rushed to settled back into its role as it hears you approach the door. The home, that cradle of comfort and reliance, has shifted in your absence. The house is empty, the hallway dark and everything quiet and still, the rooms being filled again with voices and footsteps. You aren't disappointed. You're charmed by the unexpected strangeness. Nothing physically has changed in the home. You've just forgotten familiarity, having become accustomed to brief stays in foreign places. Knowing that the sheen will soon dull, you walk through every room, and you turn on each light and look at the objects and their formations in the room in a curious way that will vanish with the scrub of morning light.

A-L

And that's how I see her -- fading into everything. She makes the intimidating sky familiar, and imbues a well-known room with the energy of chance. Spaces conflate, and I never feel anywhere but with her. The peak of a pine tree; the threshold of a den; the mercurial land above us -- your love blends.

Photo by Kristian Jordan: http://www.flickr.com/photos/dawntraitor/9232333467/

Tooth-Fairy

Alan had misheard his father when he first told him about the Tooth Fairy. He had heard "truth" instead of tooth. This led him to believe that truths, rather than teeth, were taken from him during the night and replaced with money. As he grew older he wondered what specific truths were swiped by this mystical barterer, and if the absence of these truths was worth the pocket change that he had received in exchange. "I'm not lying on purpose!" he would say to his dad after getting into trouble. "The Truth Fairy took that one from me!" Alan's father didn't find this amusing, and scoffed at what he considered mediocre word-play. Alan spent many nights awake, well into his adult life with a dollar fifty in his hand, waiting for the Truth Fairy to appear, ready to bargain for the truth back.

Winter

Winter is by far the oldest of the seasons- Gaston Bachelard 

I'm at my most nostalgic during the winter months. Darkness squeezes out the light from the sky as the cold air sends us inside the house. True, our homes are shelters, but they are also, in the winter especially, spaces of confinement. The freezing temperatures force us behind doors, while the diminished day-light steals our sight and we're made to look elsewhere, sent to search inside ourselves for things to see and do, for outside the world is dim. I find myself thinking back to past winters. As the season brings us indoors, I cannot move forward. I'm compelled to reflect on how the wind whipped my cheek that year, or how I chased a young love through the hard months, only to have her feelings thaw and dry up when the warm weather came. During the winter nature does its best to hold us hostage. We feel safe in the warmth of the home, but we miss the freedom of outside space. Instead of exploring nature, we retreat into the confusing cavern of our minds where memories peak out with glowing eyes, shy, but ready to be seen.

Waste

He wished that there was a way he could collect everyone's wasted time -- a technique to trap life's misused and discarded moments before they were lost amidst the day's coming attractions. "Well, that was ten minutes I'll never get back," people would say, disappointed by their use of time. He wanted to profit off this negligence, to take their time and spend it better. A scavenger, he swung in like a pendulum, hoping to save what seconds he could. His home became a landfill of squandered days, a midden of missed chances and regret. There was so much that he could do with this extra time. He could repair the broken moments, filling the cracks with imagination, the holes with vigor. Soon there would be so much time. "I could give it all back," he thought, "give everyone another chance." So he opened all the doors and windows in his home and let all that fixed-up wasted time back outside where it could be found waiting in a conversations and parties, lovemaking and celebrations.

Car Crash

There are two memorials in Winnipeg that I drive past regularly -- a cross with flowers by a set of train tracks; you can see the flowers dead above the snow in Winter. The other is a tree where the bark has been shaved off for people to write their names and notes. I know the stories behind these shrines, but there are many similar displays that I see on highways across the country that have no meaning for me but to alert me of the tragedy that now owns that stretch of road. Are the memorials erected for the deceased or for the mourners? Likely both. But what about those that wander by, unconnected, yet curious, even bothered, by the roadside shrine? Driving always bears the possibility of death, and these markings only reinforce such thoughts. A stare into the prairies is interrupted by a highway crucifix. Other people's tragedies are sad distractions on the way to where we're going. Are these spots the places where lives were taken, or the final place where life was lived? Perhaps the flowers, candles, and crosses provide a seal to this space where grief ripped through. I don't want to understand the tradition. Still, the memorials are forever seen by us all, and we always know what they mean. The vagueness of the symbols to a stranger's eyes ignites the worst skills of the imagination.

Day

He sometimes wondered when a day was done, or if it ever could be. He knew that in some northern cities, there were months when the light never left the sky, and months where the days were mostly dark. The sun gets stuck in the high up places. Some days never finish, and others never begin. How can they sleep, those northern people, with the light pressed against their eyelids? Time is not felt the same in every place. We judge the passing of seconds, minutes, and hours by the brightness of the sky. But the sun never rests; it just leaves to go somewhere else. A slow, beautiful exit that makes us stare. And then, our weary eyes bring an end to the day. Far away, other people's eyes are pulled open by hooks of light thrown in through bedroom windows by the same sun that has left us.

Time

He wanted to believe that he never desired to "grow up," that he never wished for time to accelerate and flip forward to the "fun parts." The speed had blurred his memory. It was like the trance you enter when driving down familiar roads late at night. Suddenly, you're where you're trying to end up. You know that you passed certain streets and buildings, that you slowed down at the blinking yellow traffic lights, but you don't feel the distance. The past is always moving backwards in a slow shuffle, kicking up dirt as it looks you in the eye. You're backing away too, engaging in some kind of reverse stand-off. He was sure that he couldn't have wanted his childhood to end, not the way he felt now. Now, he wanted to participate in time, to feel the seconds drip off his skin like beads of sweat or tears. Maybe it felt too fast, living. Remembering, reminiscing, recounting. You control the pace with those things. You can see them when and how you want to. He decided that he wanted to live in the seconds, minutes, and hours of before. He felt that it was the only way he could be present.

Night

The clouds lay split in the sky like a group of ice floes being pushed by the wind. The moon, a lighthouse, a place of rest for travelers to dream.

Dead

I'm in a car with my brother. An impression of a man is at the wheel. The end of a chase. We're pulled over. I see a body get out from the car behind us in my side-mirror; I open my door and step out onto the shoulder of the highway. A harvest moon spreads a thin orange layer over the evening sky. I smile. I'm not upset getting caught. He's holding a pistol and looks like nothing. I kneel at the edge of the ditch and the man walks towards me. He puts the pistol against my head. I clench my teeth, and when he fires I feel only the cool metal leave my temple. No pain. There is no sound. I crumple forward into the ditch, my ear to the soil. Not much is different dead. Maybe I'm not there yet. An ant crawls in front of my eye carrying a crumb. I feel a weight slam against the back of my legs.

High Windows

People on the street must look small from the windows of top floor apartments. Never lonely. They don't stay still long enough to seem alone. I want to be in every room of each apartment building I walk by. Seeing the windows and not being able to look inside, I miss the people who live there even though I've never met them. And when it rains I know that there are people in the rooms, maybe sitting by the window, maybe wondering where I'm going, and never yelling down to me, asking me to stay. I'm so small down here. You're so unknowable.

Crying

Ben saved up his sobs and spent them on a big bawl. No use crying over small things, he thought. Years of tears from banged shins and extended family deaths dripped behind his eyes like water from a loose tap, the levels rising up into his throat until he could taste the pain. "I'm not only crying about you," he said to his wife Jill as she told him they were over. "Les Miserables was so fucking sad! And my cat died last year!"The bedroom was flooded by this point and Ben began to swim in his own tears. He had never been to the ocean and realized that this salty duct-water might be his only chance. This only made him cry more, and propelled by the convulsions in his chest Ben swam for hours. When he had finished crying he sucked up his tears with a sub-pump. He was parched of feeling once again and ready to store up for the annual winter wail.

Night

The shadows of trees lay like cobwebs on the street. I rode through them, and managed not to get caught and consumed by the night.

Summer

He felt fenced in by the construction din. Summer -- the season of repair. The roads redolent of cracked winter lips, all moisture drained. A new layer of asphalt glues the roads together for now; they'll shrink next winter, splitting again in late spring from the waves of heat that hover close but are unreachable in front of our eyes. Everything holds for awhile. Not much is meant to last. We emerge from the cold dark into a few months of loud preparation for what will eventually come undone. So I stay awake and watch the hours of lingering daylight that don't exist in the winter, and I listen. For awhile, the surgery stops. The streets make space for sound in the summer; the hum of silence does not get stuck in the thick snowbanks. We stay still. There's nowhere to go. We're all a little worn down too. In the day's final hours we think of how to fill the gaps in ourselves.

Bathroom Mirrors

A bathroom without a mirror is unsettling. There is already a strange, concomitant embarrassment that one feels when being seen exiting a bathroom. An absence of a mirror only heightens the anxiety. While what happens behind those doors, with their condescending "Ladies" and "Gentlemen" signs, is shameful, there is also the chance for the reevaluation of one's appearance, an opportunity to mend or mold whatever has fallen apart during the day's tests. Without a mirror we wear a look of diffidence upon our return. We push open the door and leave with our heads down, feeling like we ought to apologize to those who see us. A mirror tells us when we're ready.

Reading

For years Beth had been told by friends that she was an "open book." Until recently, this designation had never bothered her. Now she had all sorts of questions. What open book was she, and what page was the book turned to?Was she a novel, a comic book, an encyclopedia? She felt such paranoia when she thought about whether she was the kind of book that people finished, or if she was shut after a few pages and shelved forever -- left to rub shoulders with the classics, but never loved nor included. After weeks of panicked speed-reading in hopes of understanding who she was, Beth went to the city penitentiary in search of a group of illiterates whom she could befriend. She knew that they might all judge her by her cover, but that was fine for now -- she could write herself and teach her new friends how to read her.

See

I looked up from my seat on the porch to see a hornet's nest hung like a paper lantern in the crook of the supporting beams of my balcony. The bugs shot in and out of the opening of the funnel -- an ostentatious display of pride. I thought about how I had never noticed the building of these creatures' homes. One day they just exist, as if the bugs had cast a spell to distract me from looking up at the chosen corners and tree branches, or down below where ants flow out of hills. Perhaps we just never bother to take the time to look at things, to actually see them happening. And so the sting on my wrist is a reminder to twist my neck and open my eyes -- the world builds all around us.

Jungle Crows

In Japan, Jungle Crows make their nests out of coathangers, those familiar household things made of thin metal that support and display our appearances for the days and weeks to come -- waiting without a whisper in closets like the clouds that dress the sky. The crows construct their homes out of the placeholders of our daily roles. They steal the readiness of our costumes, leaving a pile of clothing in the wake of their theft --we must get down on our knees and dig through the wrinkles and creases, the slumped shoulders and folded knees, to find who we want to be; they sleep on a tangle of wires while we look for who we are. 

Prairies 3

     A small house was sunk into the ground near the edge of an abandoned field by the highway. Strange, how nature could look that way -- deserted and forgotten, unapproachable to the endless scatter of travelers passing by -- all of them asking why these relics were left to erode away, and wondering where the people went.
     The slanted, wooden roof of the sunken house made a peak on the flat field like a stunted mountain desperate to be seen. Or perhaps the house wasn't sinking at all, but poking out from some subterranean world, adding further mystery to the prairies -- offering another reason to step out and explore that laconic land.

Lake

He lay in bed staring at the dead mosquito that was still stuck to the ceiling six months later. The buzzing had kept him up that night and he had chased the bug around his room for minutes before standing on his bed and flinging his hand against the ceiling as the mosquito took a rest, failing to draw blood from the plaster, instead dying from its reckless hunger. He remembered sitting with Elizabeth the other night, her eyes red and tear tinged as she lay on his chest, telling him about how she was scared to be without him. He held her close and listened to the leaves as they sighed relief in the refreshing sweeps of the summer wind. He heard a loon's quivering call and thought about who or what it was for, what it meant. A mosquito landed on his bare thigh, itching his skin with its legs as it wandered, trying to find a place to draw blood. He didn't kill it, or even brush it away, but kept his arms around Elizabeth and listened to the cries of the loons.

Door

Before walking down the steps she turned to close the screen door outside the house. He turned the doorknob of the thick oak door on the inside of the house and pushed it closed. There was pressure between the two forces, as if the house was resisting its sealing. After a brief fight the oak prevailed. Its heaviness was too much for the thin metal and weak mesh of the screen door. All night the wind brushed up against the losing side, perhaps trying to help it close. The sound was a faint knocking, keeping him up, making him wonder how he ever let her go.

Sky

The setting sun tinged the sky with ripped blister red, the day's skin peeled back and left raw against the scratch of the hawk claw and rub of the wind. 

Exhausted

Stale taste of fatigue in the mouth. Words wheezed out in asthma gasps, sparse and struggling to say much of anything at all. Sedate tongue lying limp. Stagnant saliva, a murky film. The hard rub of teeth against teeth. Kiss into me your lusty flavor, and lick away the grime.

Prairies 2

Snow, tall against the shoulder of the highway. The secret of the prairies gathering strength behind the cold blockade. Will anyone stop and climb the ridge, if only to stare at the sweep of unmarked land and wonder why they cannot cross it? Soon the walls will melt. Water will flood the road and the grass will puncture into view. And we'll drive past, able to see again, still feeling unwelcome, and struggling to define why.

Beach

He lay on the sand, his eyes closed and focused on the clutter of questions crawling forward from the back of his mind. When the movement became cramped, his sight unfurled to rest on the sky, today a placid blue, yesterday grey and storm wrought, though no less easeful. And he begged for the day when he could live within the eddy of his thoughts without struggle.

Spring

My dad told me that when he was a kid, every spring after the snow had melted he'd walk through the field of his elementary school and scour the grass for coins dropped in the winter by weak, shivering hands. Each time I come up my driveway I look to the right at our lawn. Snowbanks piled four feet high, the square space of the lawn untouched for months. Come the thaw there will be no wealth revealed under the vault of snow in front of our house. Nothing will have changed. The drowned grass will gasp back to living and the water will dirty the streets. And while no bronze or silver will glint in the sun, there remains the treasure of seeing something so familiar, after having been hidden for so long.

Prairies

I've driven through the Canadian prairies for years. I'm familiar with the sand coloured fields of wheat, the yellow of rapeseed, the abandoned shells of barns and houses speckled across the hardened sea. I've always wanted to walk into one of the wrecks. It's as if sunken ships have come to rest somewhere that they can be found. Something keeps me from stopping the car and stepping out into the intimate unknown of the land. A privacy felt in its humbling quiet. A respect for it's generosity in letting us see the sky stretched out like nothing else could be. So for now I drive on past, a curious observer of empty spaces hoping one day to walk across the divide into this great possibility and that I'll know where to go, and what to do. 

First

The candlelight shivered as she walked past. He watched her walk towards him, the flame casting shadows of the room's items on her skin like thin layers of patchwork clothing that peeled away as she got closer.

Magician

When he made her sad, and she cried in his arms, he felt his love surge. It was an awful thing he found in himself, this need to feel that he could make things better. A need to make mistakes. He'd construct situations where he could shift from being the villain into the hero in a matter of minutes, happy to apologize and fix the problem, his heart warm from knowing he'd done good. He ruined for repair. But soon the wounds would be too worn down to heal, and he'd remain the cruel magician that he always was.

Sky

The evergreens hang like icicles looking to dip into the swamp of sky below them. A gull in flight over the murk. The reflection of our world in shallow lake, a smear of colour in somersault view. If only it could hold us as we tried to walk across. It's a place for a bird's eye, for those who live above the truth. Each wing flaps a secret for us to parse.

Photo by Kristian Jordan

http://www.flickr.com/photos/dawntraitor/8387669469/in/photostream/lightbox/

Going

Wondering how to get to where I'm going. Like looking at a jet-stream and trying to follow it. A soon vanishing trail teasing all of us too slow to see where it leads. Knowing there's somewhere to go.

Time

As he watched the long hand of the grandfather clock move lap after lap at a permanent pace he wondered why. Why sixty seconds, sixty minutes, twenty-four hours? He was sure there was an explanation, an educated answer to his question, but he doubted the relevance of the response. The sun rises and sets, but why must this describe a day? What if two days were one instead? Forty-eight hours. We'd get more done. The good days would be better and the bad days worse. We could stay up later and sleep longer. There would be more time to decode our feelings and fears before the day ends and they're put aside in a pile that we say we'll deal with later. Our lives will be the same length regardless. But maybe there was a way to experience things at a more focused, gradual pace. It seemed so simple.

Middle

Transfixed under the delicate exchange between night and day, she stood on a path of trodden oak leaves. Usually she found uncertainty frightening, but not now. It wasn't an uncertain light that murmured across the sky, but instead, a sureness in the embrace of the in-between. A meeting in the middle, a daily union of beauty. She too wanted to find that balance, a place where disparate things met and forged a love that was never as strong alone. Until then she waited for day to undress night, for night to stretch its body over day.

Daytime

When he napped during the day he untucked the sheets and left his bedroom door open. He didn't want to be hidden when the sun was out, when people were around. Even though he wouldn't see the faces or hear the voices or footsteps in the house while he slept, he wanted to be available to them. The lights were always on, the curtains drawn. There was a loneliness to being asleep during the day when things were easier to observe. He felt he was missing things, and so he did his best to have his life continue in warm and vibrant sights in front of his failing eyelids.

Guilt

We're both four or five. A movie is playing in the basement that we shouldn't be watching. I remember a scene where one of the characters is thrown into a forest and mauled by a lion. Somehow he survives and lives vicariously through some kind of robot. I wish I knew what the movie was called, or if I'm just dreaming the plot. That same night I asked my friend to take off her clothes. She did and stood there naked with her hands behind her back with her legs crossed, posing for my curiosity. I sensed guilt for watching the movie, but not for that. When do we begin to feel shame, to be contrite?

Night

He was cocooned by the soft blink of the sky, the stars glinting like the lights behind clenched eyelids.

Imagination

As he skimmed over the panoply of his imagination he folded certain thoughts, underlined particularly tempting dreams, ensuring that he had something to come back to if he ever reached the end. How he hoped he never would.

Sick

As an adult he missed being sick like a kid. He wanted to skip school without consequence, to lie on the couch watching his favourite movies while his mom brought him juice and snacks and seemed to love him more than usual. There is a romanticism to a child's illness. Now, being sick meant having work pile up. It meant taking care of your weak, difficult self. Being sick became being sick. As a kid, it was an unusual and unfamiliar way to experience the day, to see how your parents lived. Carefree, you basked in sympathy. Nostalgia for malady. Times really were tough.

Dreams 4

He reached the nadir of monotony when he started to feel guilty in his dreams. Sleep. The Subsoncious. A place for him to wander into forbidden bedrooms, to visit worlds that didn't exist. No. His dreams stopped before he did anything wrong, before a kiss, sometimes before a handshake. Why should he have to make the right decisions in his sleep? Gone was his only outlet for debauchery free from consequence. He was destined to live in reality all day and all night, waking up each morning quivering with contrition for things that almost happened, things he wanted to happen, but never did.

Opportunity

Every drop a moment. I stand outside until it stops, until the sun dries the skin, until the rain is mine.

Love

No one had fallen asleep on him before. He sat on the couch awake, listening to Cat Power sing about how "when we were teenagers, we wanted to be the sky." Her head was on his chest. His arm was sore, but he didn't want to wake her. He let it hurt, for every time he saw her breathe, her lips closed, her chest rise, the pain subsided. He sat as still as his love for her, afraid to wrest it from its place. The album ended, and she continued to sleep. The finished, spinning record sounded like her breaths. He stared into the dark room, thinking he'd never need to care for anything else.

Image 3

Frost on a frozen pane of glass. A tear clouded iris.

Kiss

He thought of a kiss as an intimate word. Something spoken through touch instead of sound. So when his lips met a woman's lips and his tongue slid against hers he felt that they were telling each other some ineffable thing. The breaths, sucks, and soft moans. Inflections of the speech. The wet exchange was something they kept forever, a secret that they could taste and swallow.

Vines

Like a vine she wraps herself around him. An arm around around his neck. A leg pinning his down against the bed. He lies like a rustic house ready to be overcome by a beautiful growth. She runs her fingers along his chest and he thinks of how a vine climbs the walls. Slow and furtive. He thinks of how the plant claims its home, tightening against the frame. And as she moves against him, her hands gripped around his wrists, he lies still. He feels her pulse, her breath, her body soft against his. Her breasts, the flowers of the vine, brush against his face. She wants ever part of him to be touched by her. He lets her. She envelops him.

Dream 3

He awoke sensing that he had been taught something true. What exactly that was, he could not be sure. The details had vanished, leaving only a wraith of feeling hanging in his thoughts like a spider's web. He strained to grasp what stretched farther out of reach. Like a tree at its greatest height he knew there was so much more to know and feel. Endless miles of sky waiting to be touched.

Image 2

Hoar frost on a tangle of branches. Her head on my shoulder.

Cummings

Because he writes about love much better than I can, here's the final stanza to one of my favourite poems:

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens; only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands - e.e. cummings

His equation of rain to hands is so delicate and beautiful. It makes no sense, and yet it's perfect and I understand what he means. Maybe that says something about love too. You don't understand love; you feel it, and you talk about it and describe it in abstractions and fanciful flights of the imagination.

Image

Her wet hands. Leaves after a light rain.

Workout

He was at the point of exhaustion where lathering shampoo into his hair made his biceps tire and swell. At first this worried him, but being a pragmatic man he saw an opportunity. By being fatigued he could avoid going to the gym, for washing his hair provided all the muscular duress he required. Friends would come for workout advice and he'd say to them with a smirk, "lather, rinse, and repeat. Six sets of five."

Squint

Sitting in the passenger seat. The sun's glare made him lower the visor so he could see. Upon doing this, however, he felt that he saw less. The visor completely obscured his vision of the top right corner of the windshield. Squinting into the sun at least gave him the chance to fight against the shine. He decided then that he would rather struggle to see what hid behind the painful rays than be wide-eyed and comfortable and not see anything at all.

Morrison

I've been thinking lots about film and photography lately. Often pictures are thought of as a souvenir of a particular time. We taken them so we won't forget. Of course, what is shown in a photograph can be deceiving and incomplete. A square or rectangle cannot contain an entire truth, especially considering the subjectivity of perspective. Still, photos and films remain physical proofs of existence in space and time.

Bill Morrison's 2004 film Light is Calling, like his acclaimed feature length film Decasia, depicts the decay of nitrate film stock. Like the flickering and waving of flames the film's images become amorphous shapes, always changing. Staring hard you see a horse drawn carriage emerge from haze of the rotting nitrate. A woman's face fights through as in a dream. Soldiers press forward, trying to tear away the layer of the film's festering flesh. The images in Morrison's film behave as memories. It's a battle to be seen. The scenes never change. The people still smile. The cart still moves. But we cannot see things the same way. We recognize moments, those that push with ever weakening arms against the thickening curtain of forgetfulness.

Watch this film. The score is beautiful too.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cf9ah8IUVgw

Work

The boys stood on the edge of bank, proud of the work they had done. The twelve hours of hauling mud-caked tarp out of the canal had left them almost translucent. They became part of the land, a colour in the sky. The sun began to fall and the wind rose. Red sweater, flannel shirt. Black hat, woolen toque. They stood there for awhile longer. Alone on the quiet, lonely lake, their limbs aching and mouths parched, they thought about the long walk through the field to the car. It was time to go back home. Back to where artificial lights lit the sky and work never left you sore the next day.

Photo by Kristian Jordan

http://www.flickr.com/photos/dawntraitor/7151023313/in/photostream/lightbox/

Drive

The drive home was a long stare. Automatic traveling. I think better when I move. Street signs and traffic lights crept by unnoticed. All I saw was you.

Revisiting

There is a photo of me in Grade 10 with a girl whom I had liked off and on since elementary school. She's lying on her stomach on the grass, resting her elbows on a blue duffle bag. I'm sitting beside her, leaning up against the side of her back. My left arm is bridged over her body. There are three other people occupying the frame of the photo. The girl I like, her eyes are closed, and I think she's squinting at the sun. Our closeness is forced. I think I knew that then. But now I know her eyes weren't closed because of the sun. She just didn't want to be there. Her smile is an uncomfortable one, the kind people make when they have nothing to say. Shortly after that photo was taken she left for the summer and her and I never worked out. I can see the end in the photo now.

It's interesting to look back at photographs to see what you missed or misinterpreted. The image never changes, but how you see the image can.

Opportunity

The sun descended in the autumn twilight. A muted glow, like the final ember in a bonfire. Always different. Sometimes he wished he could film each day's sunset so that he would never miss a single smear of colours spread across the sky in myriad combinations. But even if he could save the evenings he knew there would never be time to watch the tapes. There was too much else to see, too much to feel. The days short and the nights shorter. Perhaps if he never slept he could do and see all that he wanted. He was tired of being bound by time and its devouring eyes, stealing so much of the beauty. A great deal left to the periphery, teasing all the time. And so he stayed up one night. He stared out his window and watched the sun's slow dial turn through the hours, and he hoped someone else was awake, seeing the day begin and knowing that it would never be repeated.

Trapped

A photo album; that's where he wanted to live. A place where he could truly be in the moment. He'd flit from picture to picture, an itinerant man of the past. Something just seemed better before, he thought. He liked proof that he was happy, that he was in love. In the present he was never quite sure. Looking out his bedroom window he'd watch the clouds dim the sun and feel that life would always be this way. No moment to count on. Searching through piles of photographs he began to shape his new life. The perfect collage, a bricolage of the best times. A place where he knew his heart would flicker and each day was a day to look forward to.

And so his world was built. A slideshow of seconds. The beginnings of feelings. The hint of movement.

May.10th, 2012

We make a short drive from Kassel to Bremen. The Ex are playing a show on a docked boat and we grab two of the final four tickets available. We take a long walk in a light rain, going over a bridge that overlooks the Weser. Two German tall cans on an empty stomach makes me talk. I laugh at the signs that say Moderne Kunst and Aktuelle Kunst. It starts to pour and we run down the streets with opened cans of beer, the liquid spilling over the rim and onto our hands.

We have a short dinner of mediocre schnitzel before heading onto the boat. The Ex are soundchecking and we talk to their merch girl. An old-school punk named Willie introduces himself to us. We speak in broken language about the universal tongue of music. There are roughly a hundred people below deck to see the show. Everyone shuffles to the front as The Ex take the stage. Terrie rocks back and forth all night as if seeking calm from the concatenation of Katherina's syncopated rhythms, the sudden paroxysms of Andy's guitar, and the childlike bouncing of Arnold. I watch in bewildered laughter for most of the set. Never have I felt the ecstasy of music reach such transcendental heights.

The show ends and we hug Willie. Nothing needs to be said. The Ex forged a relationship between everyone in that room that night.

A more lucid explanation:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jPWcf3U4oHs

Toothpaste

She treated him like a near-empty tube of toothpaste, pressed flat and rolled up to where the dregs of his being remained. He was both insulted and flattered. More often than not she bought a new tube instead of struggling to pinch out what resisted to emerge. In desperate days, however, she returned to him, once again glad that she put him back in the cupboard instead of tossing him away. Their friendship was destined to continue in this fashion. She, seeking his friendship when there was nothing more complete. Him, giving all that he could until he finally ran dry. 

Neruda

It's late and I'm tired, so here's a thought from Pablo Neruda:

"Love is so short, forgetting is so long." from Tonight I Can Write the Saddest Lines

Dreams 2

We know lots of things at the backs of our brains. The part that touches the tops of pillows, sweating dreams into the fabric. I like to think no thought goes unused, that what I cannot understand while awake can delight me while I sleep. I imagine each pillow contains the threads of different kinds of dreams, so that when I roll and shift in bed I combine the dreams of love, and fear, and the insane. And then I wake up and wonder what it means to kiss some girl I've never seen riding on the back of a rhinoceros in a thunderstorm. And I wish that it were real.

Man

Head slightly cocked and right eye squinting at the sun. The left eye looks right at you. Small, but full of knowing. The decades of his life have eroded the falsities found in photos of those who know they're having their photo taken. This elderly man has nothing to hide; the photo is an offering. His right hand cups a bunch of grapes. They're for us. Generous and sage. His shadow extends long and lean from his feet, and we see that he uses a cane. In this moment, perhaps we imagine the shadow as someone else. A taciturn man with his back turned, not wanting to be seen. Maybe we want this follower to leave, but we know he never will, so long as the sun is out.

Photo by Kristian Jordan

http://www.flickr.com/photos/dawntraitor/8388759438/in/set-72157632543434108/lightbox/

Looking

He started to notice things. The fly that hung around until early winter, drunk in the air and flying slow as a falling feather. Easy to swat. The way his Grandma never says goodbye on the phone, but "bye for now." A reassuring farewell. The way butterflies hit the windshield of a car. Quiet and clean. The way her left eye squints when she smiles, like she's looking at him two different ways. Seeing who he is and how she wants him to be.

Night

The telephone wires hung limp in the calm black sky, skeins of conversation tiring them out. At 2 A.M it's quiet on the street. No sound of cars. No echoes of the day. Just the boot crunch on packed snow. The lamps between houses form dim spotlights on the road. Places to stand and recite the monologues that can't be heard when things are busy. 

Rhythm

The days now only suggest an end. Everything seems to continue in a familiar rhythm. We don't notice much that happens, and we feel that things must be fine. The cold brings a long sting to our faces, but we expect it. The feeling isn't new. And soon the snow will melt and we'll embrace the gradual warmth of spring. Still, I feel we'll stay put, the seasons a frame around our constancy, the colours and temperatures changing as we wonder, without will, how to move.

Change 2

The change didn't bother him. He was ready to be confused again, to be spun and sent somewhere he had never been, to be cut in half. In some ways he had been wishing for this rupture. Split in two he could let himself spill out, and like a child could search for treasures never known in the streams and puddles left after the storm.

Lips

When he was anxious he bit the skin on his lips, peeled it off in thin strips like removing a sticker from a sheet. He wasn't sure why he did this, but it was difficult to stop. He could feel the inconsistencies on his raw flesh, the changes in texture, the dried pieces that hung on scraping his upper lip. And so he went to work, leveling the surface, creating a smoothness. Perhaps he thought his worries were stuck in his skin and by tearing away the top layer everything would be made okay.

Wheelies

     Disco on wheels. For kids of the 1990's Wheelies Roller Rink was a place to experience a decade we never had. Iridescent and large, a disco ball hung in the center of the rink reflecting colours from the spotlights. Blue, red, and yellow -- luminous ribbons sliding across the floor. Top forty music and cherished hits from years past projected out the speakers, guiding the speed and rhythm of our movement around the rink. The room was designed for the chase of young love.
     But the strongest memory I have of Wheelies is not the pursuit of a girl who stumbled in her rollerblades, but of an evening speeding around the floor with my hockey team. Our skill on the ice was easily transferable to the roller rink and we skated with confidence and powerful grace. Perhaps self-conscious of the juvenility of the outing some of the guys created their own danger. Remember pixie stix? The thin, bright coloured straws full of powdered sugar? One of my teammates had a whole bag, so a couple of the guys went into the washroom, poured out the sugar on the sink and snorted it like cocaine. Then they'd come out of the washroom wide eyed and grinning, hunched over in a hockey stance, moving around the rink in chopped strides acting out their Scarface fantasy. This routine was repeated several times throughout the night. They insisted it gave them a rush. It probably did. It was sugar. I couldn't dispute that. But I never snorted any of the sugar. I knew that if I wanted that cheap feeling of brief energy I could drink the sugar the way it was meant to be taken. But that stuff tasted like shit. Instead, in long strides I skated alone, proud of my ability to differentiate cocaine from powdered sugar.

5

A chimera. The leaning in for a kiss. Unable to transcend what comes to a point at the corners of memory. Immured in a cutting-room of the past. You rode your bike through the labyrinth of condominiums on Summerfield Crescent. I had never seen you before. I don't see you now. Nothing but a form on a bike and the remembered excitement, a moribund impostor of feeling.

Photograph

They face each other, the two of them. I can only make out forms. A Rorschach image. In the middle of a path surrounded by trees smudged together, bushes bonded by dusk. The branches, feint veins awash in a dimming sky. Nothing defined. The residue of truth. In between the figures a glint of light. They look as if they're standing inside themselves, a fainter form, a wraith of their bodies aglow against the living shapes.


Photo by Kristian Jordan

http://www.flickr.com/photos/dawntraitor/8387727227/in/photostream

Rain

When it rains I'm given back days thought dessicated by time's rapacious lips. I don't feel the gentle drops that surprise the shoulder, nor the cascade that soaks in seconds my entire body. The rapping of droplets on car hoods. The thought that you could dodge each drop by running fast. Gone. When it rains I'm five years old on a play structure in a small field surrounded by condominiums. The sandbox flooded, we jump from the monkey bars into a brief suburban sea, the sky's gift to youth on a pastel day. Only when it pours do from her lips come moments thought withered, spit from the clouds and caught running down my cheeks. No longer on the day after rain can I swim in a sandbox in a stretched white shirt, unconscious of the forming ellipsis imprinted by the suck of her lips.

Later

 Nascent and true, thrust into love's mire -- abandoned to ferment in a midden pile of the unusable. Find me a place to store what I cannot feel unfettered. Perhaps in the folds of sulci or the chambers of the heart. Create a memory of the future, a time untrue but in the mind -- anamnesis of this. You do the same. And maybe then, in vacant promised days, we'll find use for what we were forced to forget.

Art

      People romanticize the "tortured artist"; I do too. There are times when I wish that my life weren't so easy, so normal. But then, when I feel the slightest tremors of sadness and pain, of shame or embarrassment, I become paralyzed and helpless in my ability to develop these feelings in an artistic, or even a palatable way. I seem to require distance to be thoughtful and creative, at least when attempting to forge beauty from bleaker times. Yet this seems counter-intuitive to producing truthful and powerful art. Once the feeling ceases to exist in any substantial way does the possibility remain to transform or represent that feeling into anything more than a cursory recollection?  Perhaps the issue is fear. A fear of discovering or finally understanding how you feel about something. To make yourself vulnerable to yourself is an oft avoided action. It's safer to remain ignorant to the sources of feeling, but it's also emotionally and creatively stifling. Giving a voice to what has so far been silenced can induce a necessary cathartic shock. Much will remain in confusion and obscurity; that much is certain. But I feel that an artist, or anyone for the matter, owes it to themselves to take the risk in navigating the morasses of their minds and hearts.

Storm

     When the next storm came he drove out of the city and parked his car in the middle of a field where no one seemed to live. He unbuckled his seat belt and reclined his seat. The rain pelted the windshield with such force and frequency that he felt he was looking at a smeared oil painting.
     He loved how the sky sounded during a storm. The ceaseless chatter of the rain. The argument of the thunder. He liked to imagine that sheet lightning was the flash of a giant camera, capturing the scene from a privileged vantage point. But there was nothing that excited him more than fork lightning. The sudden stabs of light, nature's knives splitting trees and starting fires. A violence he felt safe from in his car.
     When the storm ended he drove back into the city where buildings blocked his view and people liked to talk.

Gone

     "I feel so far from everything out here." True, she was miles away from all that she knew well, but the distance she felt was something ignorant of physical space. At home, curled up and held by familiar arms she felt as alone as in this quiet town where the people looked down as they walked and the muted sky caused the ringing in her ears to remind her of the stalking silence.
     He told her that he missed her too, but that wasn't what she meant. After she hung up the phone she walked out on the balcony of her second floor hotel room and stared out at the road below. A streetlight flickered and buzzed and the sound made her wonder if someone was sending her a message in Morse code, something urgent that she couldn't decipher. And so she stood there leaning over the balcony, staring at the failing light until it no longer stammered in its speech and finally conceded to silence in the ever quieting night. Still, she stood, waiting for something she hoped would come by morning.

Dreams

     He never got into an unmade bed. The tangles of the day were enough without the twisted sheets and wrinkled patterns of the previous night to compete with. An unmade bed is a welcoming beginning, a place to willingly succumb to night's wonder and trickery in hopes of a pleasant voyage to a place without consequence. He wanted to dream all night, to be taken to places he wasn't allowed, to see things that could never happen -- to love people he never thought he could. Sleeping, he lived with the reckless play of a child, a life free from the miasma of foresight. There were nights when he wished never to be woken up, nights where the quiet desires of day were enacted behind his eyes. Always, though, he woke up. And he wondered where the truth lay. Did he really feel the things he felt in his sleep? Sometimes they hung around for a long time, casting doubt on his days like a shadow. He felt like his silhouette was the part of him that lived in his dreams, forever beside him, yet impossible to fully reach. A suggestion of who he might be, following him forever in the judging gaze of the sun.

Change

     In spring the remaining snow patterns the field like fallen clouds. Blades of grass, smothered for months, begin to unfold themselves as they dry in the sun. Wet streets are covered with gravel. Cars make a sound redolent of a fire’s crackle.
     As winter unclenches her fingers in a slow release from her dark grip we begin to see again. The hours are less confining and the sound of the sky changes. There’s more to hear than the lonely wind. Leaves flutter and birds bring back their scattered tunes.

    We hope some things survive the ache of the thaw and emerge waiting to greet us. Things too far to reach in the cold. Things we waited the winter for. Damp and shivering before us we bring them close, feeling their tremble slow until they're still in our arms -- perhaps for the first time.

Taxidermy and Other Stuff

     I saw a film earlier this year that contained a scene of a man performing taxidermy on a duck. The bird was killed only to be torn apart, emptied, and sewn back together. Primped and mounted, the taxidermist makes death beautiful. Now the bird is displayed in a museum or hung on some hunter's wall as a reminder that in the battle of fowl versus firearm the gun wins every time.
     I look at the duck with it's glass eyes, posed in the act of a futile takeoff, and wonder why we don't preserve people this way. Why don't we gut and stuff our Grandparents and nail them above the fireplace? Then they would never have to leave us; we could see them every day dressed in their best clothes with smiles forced on their faces, their kyphosis corrected, always willing to look us in the eye.

Travel

No time for pleasantries in a place where wondrous nights fleet with the hungover haze of the fast approaching morning. No time to talk about anything but everything. Desperation lingers in every word. Strong relationships are formed in hours. Expensive vodka is bought. Music is shared. Everyone hugs and I fret for days about never learning the last name of a girl named Mara. In a place so unfamiliar, you seek to know people. Not meet them, but know them. And so you open up, you tell them how they look beautiful in sweatpants, and how they live in a paradise you wish you never had to leave. And they tell you how different cultures deal with death, how they dream in English, and how American men stare at them when they walk down New Mexico streets. And in the bathroom mirror at a bar in Den Hague I see myself smile. A smile conjured by this mysterious comfort and love for beautiful strangers.

Then the morning comes and you miss the people you've just met. You know that the hours you've spent apart will increase until you've lost count and they've forgotten your name. Still, you feel that you know them, and that they know you, in ways no one else does. And so you get out of bed wondering who you'll meet that evening. And you feel okay.

Grandpa

On April 30, 2003, my Grandpa died. Spring had broken through the thick winter, and only small heaps of snow remained, hidden under the shade of trees, melting with each ray of sun that poked through the needles and branches--a slow disintegration, quiet and unobserved. My Grandpa too, began to disappear, and my hope for him was measured by his body weight. Each pound that he kept or gained was another day of life.

The scattered snow didn’t fool us. We knew winter was over.

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    At noon the day my Grandpa died my dad dropped off my lunch at school. I asked how Grandpa was doing. “Not well,” he said. I had heard many times that year that my Grandpa was not doing well. Each time though, a few days later, he would be doing better. This time, better never came. My Grandpa was dead when my dad came by the school, but I wasn’t told until the end of the day. I had kissed a girl after my dad dropped off my lunch. I’m thankful he didn’t tell me the truth. It would have marred the kiss with grief, or prevented it from happening at all.
    No one close to me had died before. The etiquette was unclear. I thought I should be alone, so when I got home I went into the basement, sat down on a couch, stared at the carpet, and then at the TV. I tried to cry but I didn’t know how. I could understand the loss, but couldn’t feel it. When I came back upstairs I looked out the window and saw my mom walking up the driveway. Grandpa was her dad. She tread softly on the concrete--uncertain, as if she didn’t want to get anywhere, as if she had nowhere to go. Nothing offered distraction. No chair to relax in. No taste to the food. The house provided no comfort. In grief, everywhere feels the same. Everywhere, there is a lack. 

I went to a birthday party that night, but I don’t remember anything about it. Just staring at the black TV screen and seeing nothing but my reflection. Searching for sadness. Angry at the lack. Relieved, too.

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    My Grandpa was tall with wiry muscles. He loved to garden, and he hated squirrels. He’d lure them into a cage with peanut butter and drop them off on the highway, or squirt them with a high pressure water gun. Whenever my family visited he’d give me and my siblings a caramel Werther’s candy and I always looked forward to it. Sucking on the candy made it last longer, but crushing them filled my mouth with the taste. I never had the patience to enjoy their full life.
    My family moved into my Grandparent’s house after Grandpa died. We keep a dish of Werther’s candies on the desk in the front hall as a reminder and a tribute. My friends fill their pockets. I never take one. They were special when he gave them to me. Now they’re too available.
    When we first moved, the wallpaper in the house was a lustrous silver and gold, patterned with Egyptian hieroglyphics. In the den were cabinets of brass animals from trips around the world. Elephants, birds, and bulls. Years passed before I noticed the armadillos having sex. In the center of the living room is a wooden table with a glass top. Underneath, three dimensional and whittled from wood, two iron clad female warriors ride with knives and bows through a town lined with trees. The main floor of the house looked like an antique shop.
    The most important items in the living room were a velvet, olive green couch, and a grandfather clock. My Grandpa and I would sit on the couch and talk about hockey. By moving my fingers across the nap of the material I would write my name on the couch, erase it, and then write it again. Easy to bring back, but easier to wipe away. My mom told me that my Grandpa would do the same thing. The grandfather clock worked back then.
    We waited a few years before we stripped away the wallpaper and got rid of the couch. The walls are brown now and don’t glitter in the sun. The new couch is a darker green and made of leather. There are no hidden shades or secret colours, no places to write your name. We kept the grandfather clock. Sometimes it works and the bells chime on the hour. Usually it just stares with both hands stuck at twelve, as if posing in eternal prayer. 

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    Vestiges of a life. The way he looked. The way the house looked. Conversations all too vague in their details. Like the hidden snow and velvet nap, what I can recall returns only to disappear again.

Sparrows

     For a second they formed an archway over the highway. A flock of sparrows. Each day I drove by the birds emerged from a field of sunflowers on the right of the road. They would greet the sky together, suspended at their apex for a time so short it couldn't be counted, only to drop down between the thick stems and become hidden. Rising and falling as breaths. A living parabola. Light and graceful like leaves thrown up in a gust.
     I took comfort in their reliability. I knew that the sparrows likely made the short journey across the highway several times a day. That didn't matter; they were there whenever I drove past. I looked for them every time, watching the unfettered beauty of their movements for the second that my car drove past, and looking forward the day when I'd drive by next.

Apartments

     On the morning of my first day in Germany I sit in a rented car parked on a cobblestone road beside a small restaurant. To the left is an apartment building. The same as any other. Full of people I'll likely never meet. Some rooms have the blinds drawn. In others I see bookshelves, the edges of sinks, the rings of a shower curtain. Teasing peeks of stranger's lives.
     Apartment buildings make me lonely. I see the light of a lamp -- familiar until a woman's shadow is cast on the wall. I wish I knew what was happening in each room, if the people were happy, if they were in love. I wonder if they see me in the car window and think of who I am.
     The shapes of bodies continue to move in and out of the window like aimless actors, missing their cues and never knowing. Not caring, for they don't know they're being watched and thought of.

     Apartments are reminders that we are petals in a field -- noticed, but never known. Beautiful, but never truly seen.

Town

The final line of Richard Buckner's song "Town" is a question that I have never directly encountered before: "What will you miss when things are fine?" Strangely, I feel that this question is one that has tugged at my thoughts for quite awhile. Understood rhetorically, the question serves the purpose of prompting further questions. What does it mean to be "fine?" Does being fine require one to miss someone or something, or are you only fine once you cease to miss anything?
     I feel that the subtext of the question suggests a satisfaction or necessity in the feeling of missing someone/something. In some way, we like to miss things. That familiar aching pulse that spreads through our stomachs, though painful, is something we crave. The feeling is a mark of value, a reminder that we care for or about someone or something; it's a way to hold on to the irretrievable and intangible.

So, if there had to be an answer to the question, "What will you miss when things are fine?", I would say: "Lots."

There is much more to say about Buckner's question, so this post will serve simply as a starting point.

Here's a restrained and beautiful performance of Buckner's "Town" to make things better.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wFbnjsUcZ-M